Kathrine Switzer speaks on women's running at Boston and beyond

ROAD AHEAD

Iconic women's running pioneer will speak April 28

Kathrine Switzer will always remember Boston Marathon organizer Jock Semple sprinting after her in 1967, catching her and jostling her, demanding "Get the hell out of my race and give me back those numbers."

She'll also remember her then-boyfriend, All-American football player Tom Miller, delivering a shoulder block into Semple, sending him flying.

Switzer, who entered the race as "K.V. Switzer," her byline for the Syracuse University college newspaper, became the first woman to officially enter and finish the famed race that year, crossing the finish line in 4 hours, 20 minutes. That's the year Amby Burfoot finished 17th overall, a year before he won the event.

Instead of resting her career on that singular event, Switzer used her new profile to elevate women's running to the showcase it is today. Because of her work and determination, the women's marathon was added to the Olympics in time for the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

Rather than simply being remembered as the first woman to officially finish Boston, she has embraced the opportunity to help place women's distance running on an even playing field with men's.

"Everybody wants to hear the Boston Marathon story," Switzer said from her home in New Zealand last week. "I tell it as overcoming the impossible. No one can believe how after that experience we would get to where we are today with women's running, where 53 percent of all U.S. runners are women."

Switzer will be the keynote speaker for the St. Luke's Half Marathon and 5K Pasta Party that will take place 7 p.m. Saturday, April 28, at the Allentown Brew Works. Both the half marathon and 5K races that take place on April 29 are sold out, but tickets — priced at $30 — are still available for the pasta dinner. You do not have to be entered in the race to attend the pasta party. Switzer will speak on her initial experience at Boston, as well as her role in helping women's running to become what it is today, both in the U.S. and worldwide. She'll also be on hand as a celebrity on race day.

Truth be told, Switzer is more enthused about the heights achieved by women runners rather than her Boston tale.

Switzer, now 65, spends half the year in New Zealand and the other half near her childhood home in New York's Hudson Valley. She ran the Berlin Marathon last September as well as "two really tough mountain marathons six months before that here in New Zealand."

She won the New York City Marathon in 1974, is an author of two books, a lecturer, a broadcaster, race organizer and flat-out inspiration to both men and women runners who embrace her no boundaries philosophy.

"Never did I believe in women's-only running," she said, "but in us running together."

Despite that, her moment in Boston provided the profile and publicity that other race organizers sought for women.

"In 1972, after women were made official in Boston," she remembered, "a ladies leg shaving cream sponsor went to Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Road Runners and its race director, and asked him to organize a women's-only marathon. Fred came to me in a panic and said, 'My God, we can't have a women's-only marathon. There are only six of you in the country who can run 3:30 or less.' I immediately thought mini-marathon. We could run it in Central Park and get a lot of women to run."

That race drew 78 women, which was huge for the era, and launched Switzer into the career of a race organizer.

"That race gave me the inspiration that if we could show a women's-only event was non-intimidating and fun, then we could get a lot more women running and get it to the Olympics," she said.

The marathon distance of 26.2 miles was considered too brutal for a women during those days before Switzer helped raise the bar. The thought from the medical community and male race organizers was that it would ruin a women's uterus and her ability to bear children.

"The problem with women's running had never ever been men's runners or the men in the running clubs," she said. "We were always welcome. The problems were from the curmudgeonly race officials, some spectators and sometimes the media.

"What was really frustrating was convincing the International Olympic Committee to get the women's marathon into the Games. We finally had the numbers finishing in respectable times and Greta Waitz and Joan Benoit going under 2:30, but the IOC was still hung up on the old medical thing that the distance injured women and their ability to have children. We didn't pay for the research, but we helped publicize some of the studies."

One of those studies, by now-renowned Atlanta physiologist David Martin, showed that women were ideally suited for longer distance while men were more suited for sprints and jumps. The positive scientific evidence convinced IOC officials to include the women's marathon for the Los Angeles Olympics.